Excitement about NatAmi

[Louis Dias]

Actually the '060 card is 99 MHz.  It's the N68050 softcore that is in the 100+ MHz range.  With opcode fusion any pair of opcodes that can be simplified into a 3 operand instruction will be fused as one opcode internally.  This means that the '050 will compete well per clock vs. an '060.  (Note:  Since the LX board's FPGA was too small to hold both the '050 core and SuperAGA, the MX board prototype will have to be produced before the profiling and testing of the '050 core will be complete.)

Remember that the team gets to buy their systems first for testing purposes.  By the time you can buy the production model, the '050 softcore may be already running 100% performance and the team will be working on the N68070 to be superscalar on top of that.

BTW, if you try to run UAE on an ARM Cortex A8 (such as the Pandora), you'll see that it typically trips over itself and delivers roughly stock A1200 performance.

For the fastest '060 read the clock speed of this and weep:http://www.natami.net/gfx/NAe60F/NAe60F_1.jpg

Amazing what some die-shrinks over the years have done for the old girl. :-)

[Louis Dias]

@thread

What is this cycle exact rubbish I keep reading. There IS NO SUCH THING.

All Commodore Amigas A1000, A1200, A600, A4000 etc are never cycle exact to each other - they technically cannot be because they all run at different speeds !

The are compatible but never CYCLE EXACT - ask any engineer.

Funny, Gunnar said the said thing.  Imagine that...

@the_leander
Can you prove to me the sun will rise tomorrow?
Mathematically, if all goes to plan it will.  However, it could go super nova over night...
Seriously, stop being ignorant.  MikeJ's board is already blitting something like 40x faster than a real Amiga because of the memory bus.  Natami's has already been demostrated to be faster on the LX board.  But oh yeah, you can't buy the LX board so it doesn't exist and is vapor.

[Louis Dias]

Strawman.

Before I go on, you do realize that "blitting" is basically just moving memory, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_blit

I ask you (repeatedly) for evidence to back up your assertions and you utterly refuse to supply them, then you accuse me of ignorance? GTFO!

DDR2 > DDR1 > SDRAM > Amiga DMA  now relate: Natami>fpgaarcade>MiniMig>A500
Until you have accepted this, there is no point in going on...
DDR2 is clocked higher and transfers twice the data of DDR1.
With data being transferred 64 bits at a time, DDR2 SDRAM gives a transfer rate of (memory clock rate) × 2 (for bus clock multiplier) × 2 (for dual rate) × 64 (number of bits transferred) / 8 (number of bits/byte). Thus with a memory clock frequency of 100 MHz, DDR2 SDRAM gives a maximum transfer rate of 3200 MB/s.

Now what is the memory transfer rate of an unexpanded Amiga 500?  Let's see if you know how to do your homework?
I'll even help you out:  The Draco could do 30MB/s which was even faster than Zorro3. 3200/30 is greater than 100.  Amiga's bus is 3.57 Mhz and only 16 bit on the early models.
However, I do realize that the sun may not rise tomorrow.

Until it is released, all your claims are just that - claims.

See above.

SamuraiCrow at least had the good sense to coach much of his response as something he hoped for rather than fact.

He's not wasting time justifying what is obvious.

Fixed.

however your thought process seems broken.

Yes. Given the history of this community and all the hardware that never moved beyond prototyping (or even got that far). This is the only reasonable position to take.

The developer has announce boards are almost ready for production.  It has already gone through 2 prototype stages...that have been well documented.  '060 cpu cards have been developed a long time ago.  You are fighting a useless fight.

It sad that someone make a statement on this forum.  Someone else is then in disbelief and demands proof despite have no basis for such a demand nor even has a right to make any demands what so ever.
Wouldn't it be simpler to come up with evidence to the contrary on your own rather than troll out demands that carry no weight other than in your own little black book?

[Louis Dias]

I remember that boards were initially planned to be released summer 2008. What does this "almost ready" mean this time?

Why don't you direct your question to Thomas?
Did you ask MikeJ this 1.5 years ago?

[Louis Dias]

And before you continue, you do realise that unless you back up your claims with evidence, they will viewed with suspicion by anyone else, right?

You continue to troll.

I don't give a crap about the A500's memory transfer rate. I am asking yet again for you to back up your specific claims regarding the Natami.

Can you show that the blitter is capable of anything like the 100x increase you claimed earlier? (Hell even being able to show it works at all would be a start).

You failed algebra.  The potential is closer to 400x the speed of an A500 blitter but for other reasons that will only end up in the 100x-200x range.  100x is a conservative #.

Expecting proof for technical claims = broken thought process. Only Amiga makes it possible.

You failed reading comprehension as well.

On schedule and rocking eh?

Yep.  2 more weeks infact... /lame

So no one has the right to challenge your claims? Epic!

You could challenge them if you had facts but you don't even know the first thing about blitting and memory access speeds.  No one else is disputing the possibility that this is possible.  Stop and think: what do you know that they don't?  No really - stop thinking, you'll just run yourself in an endless loop looking for the answer.

It is not my job to disprove your claims, it is yours to back them up with evidence. Only a fundie or someone with a similar level of intellectual dishonesty would claim otherwise.

Then again I am talking to gamecube boy, so I shouldn't really expect anything better.

If you want to call me a liar, then come back with facts instead of challenges.  I gave you facts and you come back with more trollish remarks.
Rogue on AW.net said they OS4 could run on the Wii.  You, sir, lack much upstairs...

[Louis Dias]

No you are correct no one knows anyhting about blitting apart from you.  You don't get it do you, without any proof or benchmarks to back this up all your claims are just that claims and theoritical.  
 
Yes OS4 might possibly run a Wii but god it would be an awful experience.  Im guessing, guessing mind, don't know, but did rouge say that just to shut you up on your GC/Wii os4 trolling ?

I linked what blitting was, it's just copying memory, occassionaly with a mask.  Hence your limiting factor is :shock: :horror: how fast you can move memory.

So potentially, Natami can move memory something like 438 times faster an an A500.

The reason you don't blit with an Amiga blitter anymore once you accelerate an Amiga is because any cpu >68000 can blit faster than the Amiga blitter.  With the Natami, the blitter will be on par with the cpu and free it up for more intensive tasks again.

As for your OS4 on Wii comment, simply ask yourself how much RAM is being used when you boot the OS.  All that extra ram is wasted unless you wanna load applications to fill your ram.  Wii's cpu is more powerful than a SAM440...with faster memory.  A combine 88MB is plenty to run a couple of applications considering the OS it's based on ran with 512k.  Ignorance is bliss.

[Louis Dias]

I really wouldnt want to run any NG AmigaOS on 88Mb of ram.  How usless would that be ?
 
You must be in Nirvana now if ignorance is bliss.
 
great assumption AOS4 is baed on an OS that ran on 512k, hence 88Mb is loads....wft ?

Are you denying that OS3.1 can run on 512k?
Even a direct port would only bump it up to 1MB of PPC code.  Infact, how much ram are on the classic Amiga's with PPC accelerator?  64MB?

Forget algebra, a lot of people around here seem to fail 3rd grade math.

My CD32 boots into OS3.1 using up only about 120k leaving me with over 1.8MB free.  People got issues if they think a PPC port with some added features suddenly bumps up the requirement to a mandatory 128MB.  Perhaps it is a math problem.  1Mb=1024Kb.  OS3.1 can run on an unexpanded A500.  Buy a clue.

[Louis Dias]

Nobody is saying it couldn't run on the Wii.

They're wondering what the point is!

Firstly, this is completely off-topic to this thread.

Second, why not use a PS3 or XBox360 instead - more memory, both jailbroken. Supports higher resolutions than ~800x480.

Thirdly, who is going to fund such a port of the OS to jailbroken hardware? Who is going to take the legal liability when Nintendo Sony or Microsoft say that the software is encouraging piracy, jailbreaking and other bad things, and drags you through the courts at great expense? At least Sony did support it in the past, so that's a lower risk.

Like you said, it's OT.  Some people on here just like to razz me as if they know something.  This is also going back to a time where OS4 hardware was practically non-existent.  Porting to something you already had in your living-room made alot of sense.

[Louis Dias]

There's more to amiga blitting than just moving data, even with a mask. The amiga's blitter could combine up to 3 sources using a user-specific boolean function and write the result to a separate destination. IIRC, the any combination source(s) and destination could be the same. As such, it's fair to say there's rather more sophistication in there than your typical graphics card blitter, which tend to be optimized memory copy units only.

As will the Natami blitter.  Hence the limiting factor is: how fast you can move memory.

Mine has 256MB. By now, most BlizzardPPC/CyberstormPPC users have fitted as much RAM as they can on their boards.

Kudos to you.  What was the minimum required when OS4 for Classic was released?
Heck, the fact that the new product, 128MB ZoRAM, is being supported now shows me that many barely had 64MB...which is my point about OS4+Wii.  But, again, OT, just defending myself from the ignorant people(s).

[Louis Dias]

How the blitter works isn't in question, it's not a mystery, Minimig has an equivalent blitter and that was years ago. It's not hard to see that creating a full 32-bit blitter that runs a lot faster would end up being significantly more impressive than the ~4MHz blitter in an Amiga. Even if it only ran at ~40MHz in the FPGA it could blit 20x faster (memory bandwidth allowing, lou's point is that the memory bandwidth is not going to be an issue here). Only the Natami people can say how fast the Natami blitter is going to operate, but if they can run their 68050 core at 133MHz, then maybe they can run their blitter implementation at a similar speed...

Thank you.

Now factor in how much more memory DDR2 moves in 1 clock cycle and then they can begin to understand...  I showed the math a few pages back, but ... geesh, it's like trying to teach a caveman the the world is round.

[Louis Dias]

Well, less than 256MB, that's for sure. In fact, 4.1 ran fine on my A1 in 128MB. However, the moment you start a remotely modern browser, that will quickly vanish.

Well, that's more a fault of the architecture the browser was ported from.
Opera runs fine on the Wii natively.
As does Aweb on the Amiga.  It also depends on whether your cache is on Ramdisk or HDD...

[Louis Dias]

^The point, however, is that the minimum requirements to run the OS, should not be viewed as the minimum requirements to do something useful with it.

I realize this.  I had a hard time running IE4.0 on less than 128MB back in the day.
But a web browser, these days, is about as memory intensive as anything gets on the Amiga, so that is an extreme case.  Let's call the kettle black here.

For most apps, 64MB is plenty.

To go back on topic, I think Natami will have 512MB (please people, you know who you are, that is not the same as 512KB).  Perhaps we can get some confirmation on this from a team member?

OT: People like to poop on the Wii but it is my primary Netflix streamer/viewer and it does so in full DVD quality.

[Louis Dias]

It is interesting to note that you jumped on Lou's 100MHz 68060 comment very quickly, and that in the next comment SamuraiCrow said that it was actually a 99MHz 68060, but that the 68050 core would be over 100MHz.

He chooses to ignore facts.  The LX board was shown in video to load and decode 24bit 256kish images in HAM8 in real time in around 5 seconds.

He tried to show you why he thought that, basically faster FPGA than FPGAArcade, a faster memory bus, etc.

Again he chooses to ignore facts while providing no valid counter arguements other than it doesn't exist...despite the actual existence of the LX board.

So he had some fancy ideas in the past that might have been based entirely upon the Gamecube/Wii having a PowerPC processor.

It was simple logic.  GC/Wii use PPC and have well know hardware (see Wiibrew.org).  A1 was dead and buried with no new hardware in sight.  Though not ideal, it puts an OS4 box in everyone's living room.

Instead of responding to him if you hold him in low regard, why not just ignore him? Or accept that some people might have less technical knowledge, and that their desire is to have a friendly discussion in an online forum in a similar way to having a friendly chat down the pub. It's meant to be fun. He's not advocating genocide for MorphOS users or something! It's been pointed out loads of time in this thread that we'll find out in due course what NatAmi is like, we're all working from what has been written on the NatAmi website, said in the NatAmi forums and said by NatAmi members here and elsewhere.

As for me, a 100x faster blitter sounds great, but I won't cry if it's only 50x faster in the end due to the FPGA, the design, the memory speed or the weather in Iceland on that day. The same goes for the 68050 design they're working on. I wish them the best of luck but we'll see if it will clock at 133MHz, or 66MHz. If they know it will, they could throw us a tidbit of information now, but until then we're taking their word for it in order to have a fun chat about this project.

Luckily I'm not the type to file reports.  His ignorance is here for all to see.

[Louis Dias]

If there's one thing I've learned when doing low level work with real hardware, there's the theoretical speed of which the hardware is capable and the actual speed that is attained in the real world with applications that test it. The interface between software and hardware is often a murky place.

User
|
Application
|
OS Graphics API
|
Driver
|
Hardware

Remember, to use the blitter in an OS friendly manner, you have to wait for it, own it, set it up to do your operation, disown it etc. etc. All of those steps take time, which is more or less independent of how fast the blitter itself can do the operation you've asked.

Will you see a 100x speed up in a real world application? It all depends. If the setup cost is small, maybe you'll experience more than that. OTOH, if there are many small blits going on frequently, then the setup latency may dominate and you'll observe a lot less.

Theorectical maximums are the only thing worth comparing because all the inefficiencies you mention also apply to the old hardware.  Just by adding buffers, yarube has made the TG68 core run like an '040...yet I'm not allowed to cite that as co-oberating evidence?  Natami bus is about 4x faster than MikeJ's board directly due to DDR2 vs. DDR1.  It's fpga is also superior.  These are facts.

One of the factors that helps make full '020's, '030's etc... faster is cache.  The '050 core is getting, iirc, 32k of data and instruction cache.  This is also what yarube did to the TG68 core.  It's not rocket science to people who know what they are doing.  Gunnar and Thomas have real world industry experience.  I see too many people here belittling their work.  It annoys me, especially when some of those people are clearly threatened by the product because they are a developer for an OS who's market could be undermined by it's success.  Other people, **cough**the_leander**cough**, just aren't too bright.

[Louis Dias]

And instead of saying anything like you're implying, he went off on one about it being pure maths to prove his case that what he said was in fact, a fact. One which if I didn't agree to, would mean I was subnormal.

All my math proved was that I was being consevative.  That fact clearly was lost on you as is much I gather.  Even Karlos knows what I said is quite possible...yet you still are in denial.

You had no math to counter.  No argument what so ever other that "numbers don't mean anything" and "mr gamecube".  You couldn't even tell me the bandwidth of an A500.  My quick math tells me it's 7.14MB/s (potentially).  Natami's is 3200MB/s (potentially).  It's simple math and my 100x claim is the bottom end of what is stated is the Natami Q&A page.  So I was only repeating someone else's claim.  You are simply being combative out of ignorance.  Go educate yourself then come back with a real counter-argument if you can find one...or continue to defend the position of your own ignorance.

[Louis Dias]

Now watch everyone as Hattig overlooks this too.

Remember folks, if you disagree with Lou, you are by his definition, subnormal.

It's one thing to disagree.  It's another to call someone out without a shred of merit behind it.  You started the insults.  Since mods seem to allow it, I'm simply returning the favor.